U.S. Education by the Numbers

Today, more students are enrolled in school than ever before. And the trend is accelerating. In fact, all of the population numbers in this article have increased by about ten percent in the past ten years; in the next decade, the acceleration will increase. For the moment, let’s focus on the U.S., and, in time, in future articles, the view will expand. Note that much of his information comes from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Before we dig deeply, I suppose it’s interesting to note that there are about 99,000 public schools (including just over 5,000 charter schools), plus more than 33,000 private schools.

This year, there are slightly fewer than 50 million public school students, including about 15 million high school students in public school. Add another 5 million students in private school, including over 1 million in private high schools.

Each year, about 4 million students start high school. (Actually, the number is about 3.7-4.0 million). Remember that number: it’s the basis for some arithmetic below.

In our simple (and, perhaps, simplistic) calculation, it would be fair to assume that about 4 million students start high school and about 3 million finish high school.

About 2 in 3 males, and about 3 in 4 female, enroll in college.

Each year, just under 2 million bachelor’s degrees, plus just short of a million earn an associates degree. And although not everybody earns a bachelor’s degree in four years or an associate’s degree in two years, on average, the vast majority of people who graduate high school–that is, about 3 in 4 of the people who started ninth grade–earn a college degree.

What’s more, nearly one million advanced degrees (masters, doctorate) are awarded every year. It’s fair to assume more than a half million people earn these degrees each year–or about 1 in 6 f the people who graduated high school.

Taking this into the workplace, in 2010, nearly 3 out of 4 college graduates were employed, in comparison with just over 1 in 2 people with only a high school diploma. On average, those college graduates also earned more money: over $45,000 for the college graduates compared with just under $30,000 for high school graduates without a college degree.

All of this sounds terrific, but I wonder whether the numbers are correct.

Last spring, The Atlantic published an article that placed just over 40 percent of 18-24 year olds in college, and offered a graduate rate (within a generous six years) of just 56 percent. If I understand this story correctly: roughly 20 percent of 24 year olds earn a college degree. The Atlantic story was inspired by a report prepared by Reuters.

So why does the National Center for Education Statistics report 1.8 million bachelor’s degrees per year? (I may not be comparing [teacher’s] apples to apples, but this discrepancy seems to be quite large.)

The purpose of this article is not to challenge these sources, but instead, to try to get a fix on the actual numbers, and the state of U.S. education today. Why? If 3 in 4 people are indeed graduating high school, then we’re working on the right problem, especially if the vast majority of high school grads finish college and earn a good wage. However, if only 3 in 4 high school grads are attending college, and only 1 in 2 of them are actually finishing college, that only 1 in 4 Americans are college graduates.

Gee, those numbers seem wrong to me–the number of college graduates is probably over fifty percent–so why don’t the numbers add up?